Russia's Odessa, in Ukraine, and Why We Can't Forget It

 Nadene Goldfoot                                           

Odessa oblast is home to a number of other nationalities and minority ethnic groups, including Albanians, Armenians, Azeris, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Georgians, Greeks, Jews, Poles, Romanians, Turks, among others.  

 Up until the early 1940s the city had a large Jewish population. As the result of mass deportation to extermination camps during the Second World War, the city's Jewish population declined considerably. Since the 1970s, the majority of the remaining Jewish population emigrated to Israel and other countries, shrinking the Jewish community.

Through most of the 19th century and until the mid 20th century, the largest ethnic group in Odessa was Russians, with the second largest ethnic group being Jews.

The presence of the first Jews in Odessa dates back to the year 1789. Between the end of the eighteenth century and the outbreak of World War II, the Jewish population of Odessa grew to 180,000 (nearly 30% of the total population of the city).                                                  

Odessa Jews developed their grain trade, shopping and banking. It is a port city, and this port was only founded by September 2, 1794.   Up to World War I Jews controlled 90% of its grain trade and 50% of it's shop-keeping and banking.  

It was such a city of importance to our Jewish history.  A Jewish community was late in arriving by 1798 but was prominent in the town's development.  In the 19th century,, Odessa was a center of Russo-Jewish assimilation and simultaneously the focus of Jewish literary and nationalist life.

During the 19th century, Odessa was the fourth largest city of Imperial Russia, after Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Warsaw

Here was founded the 1st secular school for Russian Jews in 1824.                                                             

       The composer, Jacob Weinberg (1879–1956) was born in Odessa. He composed over 135 works and was the founder of the Jewish National Conservatory in Jerusalem before immigrating to the U.S. where he became "an influential voice in the promotion of American Jewish music".   He was a brilliant Russian-Jewish composer and concert pianist. Born in Odessa, he trained at the Moscow Conservatory of Music (1901-1906) and became a concert pianist and prolific composer. He wrote the first Hebrew Opera, "The Pioneers of Palestine" (1924).

The 1st Russian synagogue with a choir,

The 1st Russian Jewish newspaper, the Rassviet in 1860.  

The pioneer Hebrew newspaper in Russia, Ha-Melitz in 1860.  

Many of the great figures of modern Hebrew literature (Mendele Mocher Sephorim, Ahad Ha-Am, Bialik, Klausner etc, were active in Odessa. 

In the 1880's it was the center of Haskalah, Hebrew literature,, and the Zionist movement from 1890 to 1914.                                   

Ze'ev Jabotinsky was born in Odessa, and largely developed his version of Zionism there in the early 1920s.  whilst renowned Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal lived in the city at one time.  Ze'ev Jabotinsky, MBE, was a Russian Jewish Revisionist Zionist leader, author, poet, orator, soldier, and founder of the Jewish Self-Defense Organization in Odessa. With Joseph Trumpeldor, he co-founded the Jewish Legion of the British army in World War I.

From the 1880s until the 1920s the Jewish community of Odessa was the second largest in the whole of Russia (after *Warsaw, the capital of Poland, then within czarist Russia) and it had considerable influence on the Jews of the country. The principal characteristics of this community, and responsible for its particular importance, were the rapid and constant growth of the Jewish population and its extensive participation in the economic development of the town, the outstanding "Western" character of its cultural life and numerous communal institutions, especially educational and economic institutions, the social and political activity of the Jewish public, the mood of tension and struggle which was impressed on its history, and the Hebrew literary center which emerged there.

                                                                        

        Leon Pinsker b:1821-d: Dec 9, 1891 in Odessa, Russian Empire-Leon (Yehudah Leib) Pinsker inherited a strong sense of Jewish identity from his father, Simchah Pinsker, a Hebrew language writer, scholar and teacher. Leon attended his father's private school in Odessa and was one of the first Jews to attend Odessa University, where he studied law. Later he realized that, being a Jew, he had no chance of becoming a lawyer due to strict quotas on Jewish professionals and chose the career of a physician.  He is well known for his Zionism.  Pinsker believed that the Jewish problem could be resolved if the Jews attained equal rights. In his early years, Pinsker favored the assimilation path and was one of the founders of a Russian language Jewish weekly He was a supported of equal rights under the law for Jews, but Pinsker's optimism was curtailed after the Odessa Pogroms. It was these events, first in 1871, and then in 1881, with greater intensity and lasting several years, after which Pinsker became active in the Hibbat Zion, a Zionist organization founded in 1881, in response to these pogroms. He was the founder and leader of the Hovevei Zion, also known as Hibbat Zion (Hebrew: חיבת ציון‎, Lovers of Zion) movement.

Political disagreements between religious and secular factions of the Odessa Committee, and Ottoman restriction on Jewish emigration, prevented Pinsker from resettling, and he died in Odessa in 1891. His remains were later brought to Jerusalem in 1934.

Pogroms occurred in 1821, 1859, 1871, 1881, and 1905.  The severest pogroms occurred in 1905, and the collaboration of the authorities in their organization was evident. In this outbreak, over 300 Jews lost their lives, whilst thousands of families were injured. Among the victims were over 50 members of the Jewish *self-defense movement. Attempts to organize the movement had already been made at the time of the pogroms of the 1880s, but in this city inhabited by Jewish masses it had formed part of their existence before then and on many occasions had deterred attempted pogroms. After the Revolution, during 1917–19, the Association of Jewish Combatants was formed by ex-officers and soldiers of the Russian army. It was due to the existence of this association that no pogroms occurred in Odessa throughout the Civil War period. Pinsker was trying to put a stop to Pogroms.  

The position of the Jews declined more after World War I.

Odessa was an important center of the Russian revolutionary movement. Under the Soviet regime it lost some of its importance. In October 1941 Odessa was occupied by the German and Romanian armies and was under Romanian military rule until its liberation in April 1944.     

The Odessa massacre was the mass murder of the Jewish population of Odessa and surrounding towns in the Transnistria Governorate during the autumn of 1941 and the winter of 1942 while it was under Romanian control.  Depending on the accepted terms of reference and scope, the Odessa massacre refers either to the events of October 22–24, 1941 in which some 25,000 to 34,000 Jews were shot or burned, or to the murder of well over 100,000 Ukrainian Jews in the town and the areas between the Dniester and Bug rivers, during the Romanian and German occupation. The primary perpetrators were Romanian soldiers, Einsatzgruppe SS and local ethnic Germans.                                               

Yaakov Dori, the first Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, and President of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, was born in Odessa,  He was born in 1899 and died on January 22, 1973, In Haifa, Israel.  He had the rank of rav aluf,, the highest rank of a General.                                               

 Prof. Israel Dostrovsky, Israeli physical chemist who was the fifth president of the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Laureate of the 1995 Israel Prize in the exact sciences, and was born in Odessa on November 29, 1918.  . 

After the Nazi occupation of 1941, the community previously numbering about 180,000 fled or were annihilated.  26,000 were massacred from  October 23rd to 25th in 1941 alone.  The Jewish population for Odessa Province in 1988 was 120,000.   It's population today is :Population: 993,120 (2017) according to the UN.   It was then the second largest Jewish population in Ukraine, after Kiev. After World War II 108,900 Jews lived in Odessa (12.1% of the total) in 1959, and 86,000 (8.4% of the total) in 1979.

Today Odessa is still known as a port city on the Black Sea in southern Ukraine. It’s known for its beaches and 19th-century architecture, including the Odessa Opera and Ballet Theater. The monumental Potemkin Stairs, immortalized in "The Battleship Potemkin," lead down to the waterfront with its Vorontsov Lighthouse. Running parallel to the water, the grand Primorsky Boulevard is a popular promenade lined with mansions and monuments. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00rq7v5MhJM

Resource: 

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odessa

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/odessa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1941_Odessa_massacre